Gutters Are Elastic

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Shary Boyle, "The Porcelain Figurine (detail)," 2006

watercolour and ink on paper. Original comic artwork for Kramers Ergot 6. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gutters Are Elastic is a group exhibition that takes an expanded view on what comics and graphic novels can be: amorphous and empowering things that don’t sit still. This project sees the gutter (the space between the frames in a comic) as a generative site of possibilities where readers insert their own perspectives. This elastic gutter centers the margins, while stretching the story off the page and into the physical space of the Gallery. From ceramic busts to narratives unfolding on handmade quilts, artworks that reference or are inspired by comics and graphic novels across a wide range of media will be included in the show. The exhibition features artists from diverse backgrounds and perspectives including Sonny Assu, Shary Boyle, Whess Harman, bailey macabre, Cole Pauls, Jillian Tamaki, Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter, and Ronald Wimberly.

The exhibition space will include a workshop, a gallery reading area, and a newsstand for local DIY comics and artists’ editions.

Gutters are Elastic is the sixth exhibition through which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question, What stories do we tell?

Artists: Sonny Assu, Shary Boyle, Whess Harman, bailey macabre, Cole Pauls, Jillian Tamaki, Momoko Usami & Joshua W. Cotter, and Ronald Wimberly

Special Event: A Conversation With Ronald Wimberly - Tuesday, September 19th at 7 pm, Malaspina Theatre at VIU | Building 310, 900 5th Street Nanaimo BC. 

New York-based comic artist, storyteller, and illustrator Ronald Wimberly will be in conversation with artist Charles Cambell at VIU’s Malaspina Theatre.

Ronald Wimberly is an artist who works primarily in design and story. He is an accomplished illustrator and cartoonist, having designed several graphic novels as well as shorter works for The New Yorker, DC/Vertigo, Nike, Marvel, Hill and Wang, and Darkhorse. His works include Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm and Prince of Cats. Ronald was the 2016 Columbus Comics resident and two-time resident cartoonist at Angoulême Maison des Auteurs. Wimberly’s most recent graphic novel is a candid but sensitive portrait of Eugene Bullard, America’s first Black fighter pilot. Wimberly balances the personal and the historical to interrogate concepts of cynicism, idealism, fear, glory, and the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism.